On Blood of Dragons MUSH we want to offer players an immersive, fully realized experience. The side-effect of this is that Blood of Dragons is a fairly information-heavy game. Fear not, however. You do not need to read everything, or even a fraction. But you will have a much easier time getting started on the game if you know where to look up a few key bits of information. This is especially true if you are creating your own character.
The most important part of the character generation (CG) is the actual concept itself. Each step of the CG is there to help you flesh out and solidify your concept, but we always recommend that players should go into the CG with some idea of who their character is. To start creating that idea, you need to look up a few things.
Every character on Blood of Dragons MUSH belongs to a family tree. As an example, here’s the family tree for House Targaryen. The full list of families available on the game is listed on our Houses page.
When you are preparing to CG your character, make sure to look at the family tree for that character if you haven’t already done so. The family tree will reveal your character’s place in the house and may also reveal various details about family members. For example, you may learn that your character’s father was killed in the Dance with Dragons or that your character’s brother was killed in the Conquest of Dorne.
In some cases, you may also be able to find out even more about your relatives.
When a character is CGed, its information becomes a permanent part of the CDB. This means that if your character’s brother has been a PC in the past, you will be able to look up such things as his history and his persona. He will probably also have relations set—maybe even to your character—and perhaps also events that show when certain things happened to him.
The best thing to do is to use the following commands on any character you feel is important to your character: +cdb/all <name>. Just replace <name> with the character’s name, for example +cdb/all Sylvina.
By looking up the available information about your family and other connections, you will perhaps find hooks that give you ideas for how to flesh your own character out. But even if you don’t have any CGed family members, Blood of Dragons has a rich history for you to weave your character into. Of course, that depends on knowing what that history is. Which brings us to the next point.
On Blood of Dragons we are using the known canon history for this period (type +today on the game to see the exact date) as well as creating our own history between the cracks. To track the unfolding history, we make regular updates to various resources on the website.
A good place to start is the Recent History, where we the past in very broad strokes. It will give you a good sense of what has happened.
We also have two “State of Play” articles, one for King’s Landing and one for Sunspear, that describe the current situation in each area.
Finally, for really in-depth information—but you usually don’t need to worry about this unless you are looking for something specific—we have a Chronicle of important events and also our Tidings, an archive of important news.
If you have chosen to take a character that is already CGed, you will want to start by carefully reading all the pre-existing material about that character. We have also created a guide to Playing a Pre-Generated Character that you will want to read.
After you have done that, we suggest that you go through the same steps as described above for creating your own character; even with a CGed character you will have a much easier time getting started on the game if you look at the family tree, at the CDB information for your relatives and at the history information.